There is a degree of irony — or déjà vu — in recent reports that putative US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr is losing some support because of his admiration for Israel even as it pursues a genocidal military cam- paign. Some 55 years ago, his father — who, unlike RFK Jr, had a convinc- ing chance of winning the Democratic primaries and then the White House — was assassinated, purportedly by a Jordanian-Palestinian, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, enraged by the candidate’s pledge, if elected, to send 50 Phantom jet fighters to Israel.

That was in 1968, on the first anniversary of the Six-Day War that dramatically shifted American atti- tudes towards Israel. Bobby Kennedy was then seen as a progressive candi- date. He vowed to pull US troops out of Vietnam, and appeared to sincerely empathise with African Americans still struggling for civil rights as well as the broader victims of poverty engendered by the American way of life.

Whether he might have made a decent president is hard to say, but he would no doubt have been a better option than the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, whom his elder broth- er John F. Kennedy had narrowly defeated eight years earlier. There were suggestions the 1960 poll might have been rigged on the margins — JFK even joked about it. But much of that was forgotten when he was assas- sinated in Dallas 60 years ago today.

That tragedy haunted RFK, who feared that in his role as attorney gen- eral in the Ke–n–nedy administra- tion, he might have stir-red up suffi- cient resentment in his pursuit of organised crime to provoke a deadly bac-k-lash. There were many other factors, though.

As a candidate, JFK had placed himself on the anti-communist extreme, but as president he turned down the option of providing air cover to the CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro exiles, which had been green-lit by the previous Eisen- hower administration. In his depart- ing address to the nation, Dwight Eisenhower pointed out the risks posed by the burgeoning military- industrial complex, but the former supreme commander had done little to curtail it. It was his successor who stood up to the generals and the CIA.

JFK accepted responsibility for the 1961 Bay of Pigs disaster, when CIA-trained infiltrators were decisive- ly thwarted by Cuban revolutionary forces. More crucially, he tu–rned down the gung-ho military com- manders who advocated an assault on Cuba the following year, when it turned out that the USSR had deployed nuclear-armed missiles on the Caribbean island close to Florida.

Back-channel contacts in which RFK played a key role ascertained that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was as reluctant as JFK to risk a nuclear conflagration. Moscow did not hesi- tate to pull out its warheads as soon as Washington vowed not to invade the island, as well as to withdraw its mis- siles from Turkey’s Soviet border. Thanks in large part to Daniel Ells- berg, we know that Kennedy was well aware of the global toll a nuclear con- flagration would entail, and he wasn’t prepared to go there. Whether his assassination in Dallas was blowback for any of his policy decisions or predilections remains a mystery. A recent poll suggests that 65 per cent of Americans don’t buy the single- gunman theory about the events of 22 November 1963.

That’s not surprising, given the plethora of contradictory evidence, including the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald never owned up to the deed, and was himself murdered less than 48 hours later by Jack Ruby, a strip- club owner with underworld and FBI connections. In the absence of defini- tive answers, the unanswered ques- tions keep piling up.

RFK Jr is convinced the CIA had a role in his uncle’s assassin-ation. That has never conclusi-v-ely been proved, even though the sordid nexus bet-ween the agency, the mafia and anti-Castro Cuban exiles is reasonably well documented. There are also unre- solved discrepancies in the official narratives about the 1968 assassina- tions of Mar–tin Luther King and RFK, and some mem-bers of both families suspect that the actual killers went free. It’s worth noting that a cou- ple of those accused of Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965 were only recently exonerated.

One of the factors RFK Jr is capi- talising on is the visceral distrust of the government that went main- stream not long after his uncle was murdered, and multiplied within a decade with the Pentagon Papers that laid bare the history of deceptions about Vietnam, not to mention Water- gate, which followed shortly after- wards. More recently, there was the nonsense about weapons of mass destruction that served as an excuse to invade Iraq — and echoes of that deception resonate through Israel’s allegations about Gaza’s Al Shifa hos- pital.

Distrust of the established order contributed to Donald Trump’s tri- umph in 2016, and may serve him well again next year. RFK Jr is proba- bly helping to pave the way.